Authors: Steve Shipside
The Way to Wealth (6 page)
18
INVEST IN YOUR NUMBER ONE ASSET: YOU
A Renaissance man of the first order, Franklin believed you worked you way to wealth by means of your own skill and nothing else—or as he put it
‘then help hands, for I have no lands, or if I have, they are smartly taxed’.
Some of us hated school and spent most of our college years drinking and chasing the opposite sex (you too, huh?). Only accountants continue to take exams after that, right? Day courses are for ladies who lunch; evening courses for people who never learnt to read or write. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
DEFINING IDEA
…Don’t waste time learning the ‘tricks of the trade’. Instead, learn the trade.
~
TRADITIONAL SAYING
Education doesn’t stop because you got a degree. Or because you didn’t. We’re all learning as we go, and anyone who wants to make themselves marketable and successful will look for ways of consolidating that learning into skills or qualifications that are recognisable and understandable to others. As Franklin puts it
‘he that hath a trade hath an estate’
, meaning that if you have a skill that others want then you have a solid foundation of your own on which to build. Which is fine if you’re a plumber or a piano tuner, but a tad more tricky if you’re a consultant or work in communications.
Trades just aren’t as clear-cut as they used to be for a number of reasons. One is that Western societies have moved away from pushing products and are instead increasingly focused on providing services. Services tend to be a bit more nebulous and so are the job titles and roles that go with them. Another is that jobs exist that have simply never existed before. I used to think I knew what an evangelist was but I had to re-think after meeting a growing number of Technology Evangelists and even Games Evangelists. For a while I myself gloried in the job title of The Naked Guy (not half as much fun as it sounds) and was in charge of podcasting, blogs and Wikis.
This fast-changing workscape, however, only serves to underline the importance of one of the staples of having a trade, which is having demonstrable skills. If the fruit of your labours is a product you always have the luxury of simply pointing at it and saying ‘I do that, me’. If, as is increasingly the case, the fruit of your labours is far harder to pin down then you might want to think about qualifications or vocational training which can add weight to your claim that you know what you’re doing.
Further education doesn’t have to be something that takes place in a classroom, either. Remote learning has boomed with the advent of the web and even old favourites like the UK’s Open University have taken to such modern joys as digital seminars over the Net. Which makes it harder than ever to say you don’t have the time or the opportunity to add to your qualifications.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…No accreditation for your trade or industry? Create one. Bespoke accreditation schemes from bodies such as the British Accreditation Bureau can be drawn up to establish credible standards for any industry or area of business. Creating a standard and complying with it is a great way of raising yourself above the competition.
Don’t be daunted by big tasks—instead break them down to a manageable size. As the man said,
‘’Tis true there is much to be done, and perhaps you are weak handed, but stick to it steadily, and you will see great effects…’
In South Africa there’s a saying which goes ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ to which the answer is ‘One spoonful at a time.’ This simply means that any apparently daunting task can be dealt with effectively by breaking it down into much smaller components and tackling those one at a time.
DEFINING IDEA
…Time management is life management.
~
ROBIN SHARMA, AUTHOR OF THE MONK WHO SOLD HIS FERRARI
Franklin, as far as I am aware, didn’t go in for elephant analogies. However, he did drum home the elephant/spoon issue not once but repeatedly and chose a number of other analogies to make his point: ‘…for constant dripping wears away stones, and by diligence and patience the mouse ate in two the cable; and little strokes fell great oaks.’
Of course, in day-to-day life you may not choose to see yourself as a cable-chewing rodent, let alone a drip, but the essential idea is this: don’t be daunted by the size of a task. Instead break it down, identify what you can do, what you can’t do, what help you need and where your own personal efforts will have the most effect in getting the job done.
A friend of mine works as a trouble-shooting consultant for global media projects that are starting to look as though they are going decidedly fruit shaped. Time and time again, she tells me, the real cause of the problem is not individual incompetence but rather a form of group hysteria. The sheer vastness of the job at hand leaves the people involved feeling impotent and squandering precious time as the inevitable deadline approaches.
Her first step is to call everyone to heel and break the job down into:
• Objectives;
• Deadline;
• Target audience;
• Our stakeholders (and their needs/goals);
• Their stakeholders (ditto).
Having laid out all these key areas, the next step is to drill down into each one in turn, examining it in a lot more detail. Now the team can focus on the effect that the category ‘objectives’, for example, has on something like the content, design and function of websites. That, in turn, leads neatly on to a discussion of the disciplines needed (which could be technical, creative, strategy, planning and media in this example) in order to get the whole project off the ground. As often as not, it is at this point that it becomes clear exactly what outside help is needed and precisely which roles should fall to which people or teams. With everyone much more assured of what their individual responsibility is, the whole job starts to slowly rumble forwards—and people stop running around in circles like clockwork mice and get on with chewing that cable.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…If you’re given an elephant to eat it’s often because someone higher up has looked at it and decided they’re not hungry. Don’t procrastinate; break the job down. If you can come up with a reason why at least part of it is really the responsibility of those further up you can delegate upwards.
Franklin is no friend of procrastinators. One of the recurrent themes of
The Way to Wealth
is the need to get on the case right now and not put things off.
‘Work while it is called today, for you know not how much you may be hindered tomorrow,’
he intones.
DEFINING IDEA
…I am definitely I am definitely going to take a course on time management…just as soon as I can work it into my schedule.
~
LOUISE. BOONE, ACADEMIC AND AUTHOR
This is all very well in an ideal world. Sometimes, however, you have no choice but to leave some items of work until tomorrow, perhaps because those kids aren’t going to pick themselves up from school, or perhaps because the alternative is to run screaming from the building and security have already warned you about doing that. In these circumstances—and in many others—the simple to-do list can become your friend.
Now, some people see to-do lists as just a means of putting things off. After all, it’s a lot easier to write down items on a to-do list than it is to actually do the things you have written on it. Others baulk at to-do lists simply because once you start detailing everything you’re supposed to be working on, there is a strong impulse to fake your own death or run away to sea, or both. However, for the true to-do blackbelts there is a mastery and mythology about the to-do list that repays the effort of learning.
Typically people compile their to-do lists in the morning, often as a way of putting off actually starting work. If it helps you to organise your day then that’s not in itself a bad thing, but it is often far more productive to write your list at the end of the day when the pressing tasks and problems are far more fresh in your mind. On top of that, you’ll be more relaxed about the tasks that you have already committed to your to-do list, as the act of organising your thoughts and writing your list calms you down. It helps you to focus on the next day, while also helping to ensure the good night’s sleep you will need to deal with that day to come. So finish your day with a today/tomorrow to-do list.
Don’t just jumble everything up in the list like a shopping list; prioritise the order of tasks by grading them depending on exactly how critical it is that they be done on that particular day. You can use an A, B, C or a traffic-light colour-coding system, as you wish, but make sure that the end result is visually clear—those truly important items should leap right off the list at you when you scan it, even in passing. Finally, be careful about that grading when carrying items over to the next to-do list. Don’t just copy it without thinking, as items which were unimportant on one day may well end up being time critical in another day or so.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…Your to-do list can shield you from those delegating task dumpers. Any delegated task must find not only a slot in your to-do list but a grading. If its grading doesn’t put it at the top of the list, point that out to the would-be task dumper and refuse.
21
BE PHYSICALY FIT ENOUGH TO EARN A FORTUNE
When Franklin tells us that
‘sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life’
he’s not referring to upside-down South American mammals—he means that couch potatoes will vacate their seats on the board earlier than their more active colleagues.
DEFINING IDEA
…A country can truly call itself sporting when the majority of its people feel a personal need for sport.
~
PIERRE DE COUBERTIN, FATHER OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC GAMES
If physical fitness was the key to wealth then Bill Gates would be taking investment advice from Chuck Norris and FTSE 100 boardrooms would be filled with ripped, lean torsos and buttocks of steel. If you snorted milk out of your nose on reading that then you’ve seen the kind of people who sit in FTSE 100 boardrooms. Clearly physical fitness isn’t a necessity for earning a fortune, and the truly wealthy are more likely to look like The Simpsons’ Montgomery Burns than David Beckham, but that doesn’t mean that fitness is unimportant to success.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade you already know that you should be exercising for half an hour or more at least three times a week. What you might have missed was that this does more than trim your waistline and give grown men an excuse to wear tights in public. In addition to improving lung and heart capacity which, in themselves, may add years to your life and improve your daily lot, exercise has a number of benefits that affect wealth as well as health.
Physical fitness is proven to help cope with stress. Left untreated, extreme stress can bring on anxiety, tense muscles, high blood pressure and low resistance to illness. Non-competitive sports help counter all of the above as well as boosting your immune system to make you more resilient to illness. By releasing endorphins in the body, exercise also makes you feel good; it’s been shown to help with anxiety and depression. A sensible fitness regime also helps you sleep better, which in turn has a beneficial effect on both productivity and stress levels. Plus there is the psychological effect that because fitness and activity increase self-esteem, they can also build self-confidence.
Put together, all that means that someone who exercises sensibly on a regular basis is likely to be sharper, better rested, more able to deal with stress, less likely to fall ill and more productive than someone whose idea of exercise is changing the channel using the remote. But before you bellow at your workforce to drop and give you twenty, just remember that this applies every bit as much to you.
By far the best exercise is that which you incorporate into your life, rather than which you take time out of life to do. If you want to get wealthy, and better yet stick around long enough to enjoy that wealth, then you’d better stop making snide remarks about the sweaties in sports clothes and instead get out and join them.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…Look for ways to bring sport into your life. That could mean transport—switch to walking or cycling instead of driving—or trying something social like five-a-side footie or tennis. You’re more likely to keep it up if you do it with others. Check out the options and move that body.